From their 2001 book “The Elements of Journalism,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel wrote, “Journalism is our modern cartography,” and I have always loved that quote.
Kovach and Rosenstiel argue that similar to how maps allow us to navigate our physical surroundings, journalism lets us navigate our social surroundings. It allows us insight into our social structures from schools to governments to businesses: where they are, what they look like, and where they are headed.
To that point, alongside John’s year-in-review, and Bruce’s sports review, I wanted to take a look at what, exactly The Hastings Journal showed readers over the course of the last year, by the numbers.
What did we write about and where did the map of the Hastings Journal show?
To do that, I went through each of our 53 print editions throughout 2025 and totaled and categorized every article. From there, I combined them into a single document and ran a frequency analysis to come up with how often individual words and topics were referenced.
The rest I counted by hand.
All that being said, these numbers are a rough estimate, meant to provide a back-of-the envelope calculation to illustrate the larger picture of the last year’s worth of reporting rather than parse individual numbers.
What I’m asking is for you to see the forest, not the trees, as it were.

By the numbers
Across our 53 editions in 2025, we wrote 604 byline articles and ran 67 press releases and 23 letters to the editor. That’s more than 11 articles per edition, and about one letter to the editor every other week.
Letters to the editor can be sent to john@thepaperboy.news.
The vast majority of those articles, more than 95 percent, were written by Bruce and me, with contributions from other Journal reporters like Joseph Back, as well as our fearless leader John McLoone.
By rough estimate, the Hastings Journal printed just under 500,000 words this year in original articles which does not count advertisements, press releases, legal notices, contributed columns, and police reports.
For reference, the average novel clocks in around 70,000 words. A King James Bible has about 780,000 words. A comparable word count for the entire year would be the uncut version of Stephen King’s novel “The Stand.”
Bruce and I took several stabs at getting a more precise wordcount ranging from programs that can rip wordcounts out of PDF versions of printed editions to having various AIs pick out articles and tally wordcounts for us.
None of them were particularly accurate.
In the end I totaled all of my articles manually and we extrapolated from there, based on weekly averages, article lengths and number of bylines overall. Our best conservative estimate was about a minimum of 474,000 words. I suspect that number is quite low.

Content
As to the subject matter of our paper—our social topography—sports topped the charts. Bruce wrote 223 articles featuring sports from the high school and beyond to include the Hastings Hawks, the Hastings Hurricanes, archery, dance, and more.
That amount is more than a third of the paper alone.
Basketball was the sport with the single highest number of articles, 16 each for both boys and girls. It was followed by hockey, which had 12 articles each for boys and girls, then baseball (12), skiing, (12) and coverage of the Hastings Hawks (12).
The Journal ran 15 articles about raiders winning awards, like Lane Hoffman, Gunner Hanstad, Sebastian Strauss, and Cole Zeien becoming national champions in the 4x200 meter at the Nike Outdoor National meet in June. Those accolades included coaches like Marissa Welch who was named 2025 Boys Tennis Assistant Coach of the Year by the Minnesota Tennis Coaches Association.
I also included in that category Bruce himself being recognized when he won the Media Award from the Minnesota High School League State Wrestling Tournament in March.
For non-sport bylines articles, (a sample size of about 235,000 words or 485 pages) the usual suspects topped the charts. Hastings was referenced 1,227 times, followed by “Dakota County,” 443 times, “School Board” 344 times, and “City Council” 290 times.
Mayor Mary Fasbender was referenced 48 times, just less than once per edition.
The Journal had 39 articles on city council meetings, and 42 on school board meetings, totals that nearly double the number of city council and school board meetings respectively (24 for each if counting school board work sessions). That is in part due to coverage of workshops across both bodies as well as the series of articles on the departure of former Superintendent Tammy Champa and the interview process that would eventually bring Superintendent Kristine Wehrkamp Herman to ISD 200 in July.
To that point we ran 15 Superintendent updates, six from Champa and nine from Wehrkamp Herman and 11 ISD 200 staff spotlights.
The Journal featured 31 articles on non-sport, non-school board education stories, ranging from the new Anatomage Table to the staff appreciation luncheon to the new Healthcare Professionals class that launched at the beginning of this school year.
PFAS was mentioned 136 times, which if you pardon the editorial, is about 136 too many times, even for the author of many of those stories. We wrote “water treatment plant” 145 times and WTP 70 times, and covered all 12 monthly PFAS updates (which were mentioned 19 times overall).
The word “said” was written 1,106 times, which if added with the terms “cited” (54) “referenced” (65) “quoted” (9) and “quipped,” (19), totals 1,253 quotes or more than three quotes per non-sport byline article.
Twenty-twenty-five saw the re-launch of the Hastings Journal’s Community Calendar which to date has featured 238 events (not counting live music) from weekly events like trivia at Spiral Brewery (7 p.m. on Wednesdays) and Bingo at the American Legion (7 p.m. on Tuesdays), to car shows and city council meetings and town halls and open houses.
Submit your events to gjohnson@hastingsjournal.news.
The Journal covered 43 events in town big and small from Rivertown Days to Pleasant Hill Library book sales to the first Park Your Art event to the auspicious arrival of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile to town in July.
The Journal featured 15 stories on the local arts scene, including previews of numerous Black Dirt Theater productions (and their Improv shows which began last week) as well as the 10-year anniversary of the Hastings Arts Center in April
We wrote 28 byline articles on local businesses, from how Alexis Bailly bottles its wines to the new ownership of the local Chevrette dealership to the renovation of the Hastings Walmart.
The Journal also showcased the mundane, featuring articles on parks (13) to weather (3) to traffic accidents (11), and road construction (7), proving that we too, can small talk with the best of them and agree that this weather wouldn’t be so bad without the wind.
These stories included the storm in late August that felled a number of trees around town and left some residents driving through inches of water on roads to speaking with the Dakota County Parks’ first artist-in-residence Ifrah Mansour.
The Journal featured 15 byline stories on statewide coverage from original reporting from the contentious first day of the 2025 legislative session to how local businesses and ISD 200 are affected by the statewide rollout of Paid Family Medical Leave.
We ran 10 legislative updates, nine of which came from our freshman, and soon-to-be former State Rep. Tom Dippel as he runs for a Senate seat this November.
We featured coverage of Dippel and Sen. Judy Seeberger 21 times from Seeberger’s teacher listening session at Pleasant Hill Library in April to Dippel’s press conference at Hastings City Hall on a series of water treatment plant bills in February to an end-of-session wrap-up interview with both legislators that we ran in its entirety in June.
Lastly, the Journal featured 147 obituaries, memorializing 147 loved ones across our community and beyond.
In going through each and every article from the last year, what was particularly notable to me were those articles that didn’t fit neatly into other categories.
Bruce’s conversation with Chris Church, Xcel Energy’s Chief Nuclear Officer on Xcel’s retirement of sirens for nuclear emergencies, a look into the world of privy digging with local history buff Brandon Lewanski, and how Steve Fox continues the Emily’s Bakery tradition with his Emily’s Pop-up bakery all come to mind.
Bruce’s coverage of St. Luke’s Weaving a Community of Hope remains a standout to me from this year.

The year in review
The idea of this article (beyond a vanity project) was to provide a look into what we cover not just for the benefit of you, the reader, but also for those of us who have the great privilege to write for a local paper.
It is a sentiment Bruce and I discuss regularly: how lucky we are to be able to showcase the amazing people and work that make our community special.
So from all of us at the Hastings Journal, thank you for supporting the local journalism that allows us to continue to tell those stories for yet another year.
Happy 2026!